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Gavin didn’t grow up with pets.
His mom was allergic to dog hair and his dad hated the noise and well, they didn’t have the money for it anyhow.
On principle, people often didn’t like Gavin. Most of his classmates had hated him ever since he could remember and they didn’t stop when he got to high school. The feeling was mutual.
He kept his teeth sharp and his guard up, and if people thought he was unloveable it didn’t make any difference to him because he didn’t care what they thought. (He did, behind that wall around his heart. He cared so much it ached. But that didn’t make people like him more, it only made him pathetic.)
His dad, especially, hated him. Gavin could do nothing right. (He never knew why, maybe it was the alcohol or the bills or just Gavin himself. But he was always a disappointment. He craved approval then and he did now. Gavin never did get what he wanted.)
People, as a general rule, didn’t like Gavin. But animals? Animals loved him.
He’d been somewhat aware of it his whole life; birds hopped up to him on the sidewalk and spiders crawled into his hands to be taken outside. But his first real connection was with cats.
Alley cats would wander up to him, rub on his legs and meow until he hesitantly stroked their matted fur. Gavin named the ones that lived by his family’s apartment growing up, one by one. Naruto and Stripes and Pillow and Lil Bitch. He bought a brush to comb through their dirty tangles and brought bits of dinner even when he was hungry because they were probably hungrier.
His dad kicked them if they got too close and Gavin never hated the man more. His mother started giving him slightly larger portions at dinner. This was a defining difference between them.
The domestic cats that lived in the apartments neighboring his would greet him in the hallways and sometimes meow at his door until Gavin quietly slipped out to pet them or his dad staggered out, all drunken rage and uncoordinated hatred, to kick and roar until he scared them off. He scared the neighbors off too.
Dogs would nearly yank their owners to the ground when they saw him. It had been a bit intimidating as kid; he was always small for his age and the dogs were so big, but he never minded the bruises down his back when they bowled him over. He was used to bruises.
Dogs were always affectionate and it warmed a place in him no one but his mother could reach. Gavin had been told he was a bad person until he believed it, but dogs always wanted to be with him, wanted his hands and his attention.
(Maybe that was why he liked animals better than people; they didn’t care if he was a bad person. They never lied or pretended to be feel anything else, so he knew their affection was genuine.)
He would leave his dog hair-covered jacket in the hall so his mom wouldn’t break out and his dad wouldn’t yell about the smell. (It didn’t work, his dad yelled no matter what he did and Gavin eventually stopped trying. He still left his jackets out in the hallway. For his mom. She was the only human who loved him, it seemed. He owed her.)
Gavin had friends, sure, but they weren’t close. He was often forgotten when making weekend plans, and as a result he spent a lot of time alone, wandering the city. (It twinged behind his walled heart and loneliness became an inescapable background hum. People need people, he knew. Humans were social creatures.)
The park was a relatively quiet place; a small island of green-brown in a sea of neon-highlighted grey. The benches were almost always occupied, by homeless people and business men and mothers with their baby strollers, so Gavin sat in the grass under the trees. He had often wondered if his mother had brought him to the park in one of those strollers when he was younger. He couldn’t picture it.
The pigeons and sparrows flocked around him and demanded food every time he sat down. There were a few occasions where he had a half-eaten chip bag or a protein bar, but Gavin’s childhood was made of empty pockets. Some of the birds would leave when they realized this, but a few, mostly pigeons, eventually settle down and rested next to him.
He felt like a mama bird, as stupid as it sounded. But Gavin was a good protector for the pigeons. No wanted to approach the weird angry-looking kid with a troop of birds and a scar on his nose. (The scar his dad gave him, one night when he got too drunk to think straight but not drunk enough that he couldn’t throw a bottle at his only son’s head. Gavin doesn’t remember why his dad was so mad. He woke up in the hospital with a concussion and the man didn’t look at him for a week.)
Squirrels would come down the trunks without fear and run right past instead of skittering around him on their way to the next tree or fence. One quiet September afternoon, a squirrel came up to him and left an acorn by his feet, scuffed by tiny teeth marks but otherwise whole. Gavin kept the acorn in his pocket until his mother accidentally threw it out. He never told her why it mattered so much to him.
Little moments of affection from animals filled the gaping chasms in his life created by human apathy. If there was good in this world, it didn’t lie with the people. This did not mean he was isolated from his peers, though. Gavin developed a reputation around his neighborhood and around school. When there was a bird stuck in the rafters of the old high school gym, the coaches called him out of his algebra class to coax it down. When raccoons got into the apartment building’s trash, the building manager begged him to deal with it. He did it, coaxed the bird out of the rafters and stopped the raccoons eating trash by leaving out Mrs. Wilson from down the hall’s cookies in the alley across the street. The raccoons liked the burned, over-salted cookies a lot more than he did.
He even managed to get a boyfriend. His name was Kyle and Gavin loved him despite the warning signs. Kyle never seemed to have an opinion on the animals he spent time with, and they dated for three months, one week, and two days before Gavin overheard him bragging about locking two tomcats in a dumpster and leaving then both to kill each other or starve.
It was a learning experience.
Gavin got to junior year before he acknowledged high school gave way to college and real life. He wanted to be a veterinarian, had already been volunteering at the local shelter for years, but his bank account and his parents let him know that was never going to happen. (His dad laughed in his face and told him he’d never be anything. His mom tried to sugarcoat it. He didn’t know which one was worse.) He wanted to help, and if he couldn’t go to med school, he would do the next best thing.
The police academy accepted him on the first try.
He got stationed at the Detroit Police Department, which was about as lucky as he got. He wanted to join the K-9 unit. He became a detective instead.
His coworkers did not like him. Gavin did not care.
He earned his reputation this time as an asshole, because his teeth were too sharp and his walls never fell. Tina Chen from the police academy was the only one who talked to him. They bonded over their mutual hatred of people. Tina had other friends. Gavin did not. (His partner Chris Miller was too nice, too accepting, and tolerated him when no one else would. They were not friends.)
Then the Holt case happened. A litter of four kittens found in a box in the closet, shoved away in an effort to forget the responsibility of caring. (Out of sight, out of mind. Gavin knew that logic too well.)
He picked up the kittens before some idiot cop could try to bag them as ‘evidence’ and held their cold, quivering bodies to his chest while combing through the house. He pretended not to notice how officers watched him suspiciously, like he was about to crush them with his bare hands. In their eyes he was a comic book villain, a two-dimensional antagonist in their hero’s journey. He let them think that. He had no honor to defend.
Fowler didn’t like him either, but Gavin somehow got his permission to keep the kittens at his apartment until a family member took them in.
This was the beginning of his career as a foster home for crime scene animals. Gavin took in abused dogs and almost-feral cats, starving birds and small rodents and even a pit viper. He adopted two little rat siblings, named them Cheese Boye and Beverage for the fun of it, and a one-eyed cat he called Fucker.
Animals at crime scenes were handed off to him automatically, and Gavin found himself being called to crime scenes not under his jurisdiction just to collect whatever poor abused creatures had been left behind. His coworkers continued to despise him, but he had earned their trust.
Gavin had finally found equilibrium in his life. He should’ve known it was too good to last.
Gavin remembered his cousin’s disregard for living creatures growing up. He’d visited his mother’s family a couple times every year as a kid, and Elijah and him had gotten along until high school. Elijah’s family hadn’t had pets either. With that much money, they didn’t have to care about anyone but themselves.
Androids weren’t humans, but they weren’t animals either. In fact, if it there was a spectrum, they’d be at the opposite end. They weren’t even alive, and it made hating them so much easier. If humans were mirrors, reflecting back his negative energy, then androids were black holes. They just absorbed it all.
Gavin knew if androids could hate, they’d hate him too.
He avoided them and ignored them as best he could. They were the pinnacle of everything that made humans awful. They showed the emotions their programming told them people wanted, but there was nothing behind the eyes. It was unnatural. Gavin’s walls got higher.
After the revolution he found a small white cat in front of his apartment, front leg missing and fur matted with blue. It had dragged itself there. It was an android. Gavin swallowed down the implications of that and took it in, cleaned up and sealed off the exposed wires despite his concussion and recently relocated shoulder. Connor had taken him down with ease, and he’d done it methodically, like Gavin was a broken toy on a disassembly line. The thought made him nauseous.
He named the cat Roomba, and it got along with Fucker and the rats. Gavin couldn’t tell if it was deviant or not, and didn’t care to find out. Androids were apparently alive, and Roomba acted so lifelike sometimes that Gavin forgot he didn’t need to feed it.
Life went on. Gavin got assigned an android partner. Fowler glared at him like his disapproval alone could muzzle him, but Gavin was tired and Roomba was okay and maybe the RK900 wouldn’t be so bad.
The android proved his bitter, pre-revolution self right. He hated Gavin. The only emotion ‘Nines’ ever showed was smugness, and teasing Gavin was his favorite activity. Gavin hadn’t wanted to punch someone this much since his father. (He died of alcohol poisoning when Gavin was 22. Gavin skipped the funeral to go volunteer at the animal shelter. Spite had kept him going since he could remember, and this android wasn’t going to stop him. He’d been surrounded by hatred his whole life.)
Gavin gave as good as he got, but it was hard to keep up with the latest, most efficient version of a superior life form. Didn’t help that the bastard was so attractive either.
Gavin was so used to his reputation preceding him that he didn’t realize Nines was unaware of his foster system until he got a call one late Monday morning. They arrived at the crime scene, a crumbling church, and Gavin was immediately handed a muddy corgi. One of its back paws was injured, he saw as he cradled it in his arms. The corgi licked his face weakly.
Gavin turned back to the car, dead set on getting to the nearest vet, and stopped. Nines was staring at him, eyes wide and LED cat-eye yellow. Gavin had never seen him look surprised before, let alone shocked. (It was kinda cute.)
Nines snapped out of it and got back in the car before Gavin could bite out something rude to distract himself from his affectionate thoughts. Gavin sat in the passenger seat with the dog and rubbed its ears and back until they got to the vet.
Sitting in the waiting room, breathing in sterile air and the smell of animal fur, Gavin looked at Nines. Nines caught his eye. Gavin refused to look away. (It was a challenge, just like everything else. If Gavin kept the hard edge of competition wedged between himself and everyone else there would be no room for soft things.)
“I did not think you could ever be so gentle, Detective.” Nines spoke finally, voice low and eyes still fixed on Gavin’s. Gavin felt a jolt of something in his gut.
“Yeah, well that’s what you get for assuming. Told you, you don’t know shit about me.” He muttered, eyes falling to his hands awkwardly laying in his lap. It felt like defeat but he couldn’t take anymore of that ice-grey gaze.
“I would like to learn.”
Gavin stared up at Nines, parallel shock to the earlier crime scene. His brain short circuited. (No one had ever told him that before. He’d never given anyone the chance. No one wanted to get to know someone they didn’t like.)
“Fuck off” was the only thing Gavin’s fried brains could come up with. Nines didn’t seem fazed by it, as usual. Neither of them said anything else in the quiet waiting room.
Gavin ended up bringing both the corgi and Nines home to his apartment. As he unlocked the door, irrational fear clawed at his chest. He didn’t care what Nines thought of his apartment, and he certainly didn’t care what Nines thought of the animals. (He did.)
Whatever Gavin was expecting, Nines’s reaction wasn’t it. The android walked in and for the second time that day, he froze. Fucker came screeching up to Gavin, demanding food as Gavin locked the door behind them. Gavin had to slip past Nines, no easy feat in the narrow hallway, to get to the kitchen. He poured out some dry cat food and glanced back to the android in his hall.
Nines was watching Roomba raptly, sitting on the couch and licking its paws. Android and android cat. Gavin couldn’t help but stare at Nines.
(He really was gorgeous. Gavin thought he might be a little in love. The thought was terrifying.)
The corgi settled down easily in the little pillow nest Gavin had in the corner while Gavin made arrangements with its new family. The pillow nest hadn’t been occupied for a while; he hadn’t fostered any animals since Nines had been partnered with him. Nines, who was still in the hallway, now watching Fucker lick his belly. Gavin rolled his eyes.
“Get out of the hallway, you look fucking creepy. Jesus, you never seen a cat before?” Nines turned to him, and Gavin was caught off guard by the residual wonder in those normally cold eyes.
“I did not know you owned cats. There were no indicators that you owned any pets.”
Gavin thought of his jacket in the hallway, the one he wore when he went to work and never got near any fur. A leftover habit from his childhood.
And Nines looked so beautiful, face open and excitement plain to see. (At least to Gavin. Nines didn’t emote much so he learned to read the tiny shifts in his eyes and mouth. It became a hobby almost. Gavin knew most of Nines’s likes and dislikes based on minute facial reactions alone.) Gavin thought of his rats.
“If you’re this excited about Fucker and Roomba, wait til you see my other two pets.” Nines raised an eyebrow.
“Fucker?” The judgement was heavy and Gavin ignored it completely. He shrugged towards Fucker, the cat licking his ears on the floor between them.
“Yeah, it’s the perfect name for him.” Nines’s disapproval wasn’t hard to read. But what did he expect? Gavin didn’t name his pets boring things like ‘Sumo’.
“You mentioned two other pets?”
“Oh yeah, Cheese Boye and Beverage! You’ll love em.” At this point, Gavin was giving names just to see Nines look like a middle school lunch monitor who’d just seen the students start a food fight. It was hilarious.
Gavin brought out the rats. The surprised joy on the androids face made him wish for a camera. Nines touched them so carefully, two fingers along their tiny spines. It reminded Gavin that he could easily snap a human spine in half. The amount of power Nines had, kept so tightly controlled, caught Gavin off-guard sometimes. Gavin watched him stroke his two little rats and thought, not for the first time, that maybe he was lucky Nines had gotten assigned to him.
Later, sitting on the couch watching TV with Cheese Boye on his shoulder and Beverage in his hand, Nines next to him petting a very pleased Fucker and Roomba at their feet, Gavin thought maybe he could get used to this. A presence that wasn’t an animal, not reliant on him for food and unaffected by his sharp teeth and walled heart, possibly wouldn’t be so bad.
After all, Nines would probably want to come over again. Fucker had taken a liking to him.
(Gavin had too.)